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Childs sterlmg silver spoon, $120 pp. (NY residents add applicable tax) Matk xclus, ly for J MAVEC & COMPANY,\ lTD. 52 East 76th Street, Third Floor, New York 10021. Telephone (212) 517-8822 SOUTH OF FRANCE Are you driving between Pans and Florence or wanting to savour the delights of Provence and the RIviera? Then we inVite you to stay on our secluded 260-acre estate owned by a hospitable Anglo-Amencan family Five comfortable pnvate apartments, pool, informal dining patios with splen- did views only half hour from Cannes. Brochure available from La Collette St-Pierre PO. Box 7543 St. Petersburg, FLA 33734; or call France direct: (94)76-96-79. retrospect, "Early in the practice of my art I perceived that what I must do in fiction if I were to do anything worth while, was to get into it from life the things that had not been got into fiction before." H OWELLS was, in his mind, break- ing new ground, creating a manner to suit his unprecedented sub- ject matter; three features distinguish his fiction and make it, even now, unsettling to our readerly expectations and irreducibly, as it were, avant- garde. The first of these we might call the Not Quite Likable Hero. In his very first review of a novel for The Atlan- tic, in 1866, Howells complained of B. Taylor's "The Story of Kennett," "The hero of the book, we find a good deal like other heroes,-a little more natural than most, perhaps, but still portentously noble and perfect. He does not interest us much." And seven years later, reviewing I van Tur- genev's "Dimitri Roudine" positively, he said, "We are not quite sure whether we like or dislike the careful- ness with which Roudine's whole character is kept from us, so that we pass from admiration to despite before we come finally to half-respectful compassion; and yet is this not the way it would be in lifer" This effect, of a hero whose moral aspect alters as we read about him, thus stirring up and challenging our preconceptions, was always striven after by Howells, and helps produce our sensation of not quite knowing, in his mature fiction, where we are. There is no question, in "Their Wedding Journey," of our not liking Basil March; he is so close to the author in temperament and intelli- gence that if we disliked him we would be obliged to close the book. But in "A Chance Acquaintance" Arbuton, the very type of upper-class Boston rectitude-a "simulacrum," Howells wrote to James, and a "stick" -is clearly not meant to be entirely likable; his faults of stiffness and snob- bery are spelled out by the author and perceived by the sensitive heroine. For all that, he has admirable traits, and is to be pitied in his final defeat, and in the ghastly comic scene where two proper Boston acquaintances surprise him into snubbing his own fiancée. In short, Arbuton is a created character; we can walk clear around him and see his several sides without confusion. "A Chance Acquaintance," indeed, slight little vehicle as it is, seems to me JULY 13, 1987 to hold the Howells essence pure: there is nothing spun-out in it, nothing limp; Howells' strong suit, his insight into the intricacy of male-female rela- tions, is played with a crispness that amuses and affects us; the whole thing is as tonic and lucid as a dipperful of country springwater. Howells' idol Turgenev, in Paris, read this little novel and said, "Now I should like to visit a country where there are girls like the heroine." But what are we to make of the hero of the next novel, "A Foregone Con- clusion"? Henry Ferris, a rather dab- bling painter who occupies the post that Howells did, of American consul in Venice, seems an unmarried Basil March, yet he has a passive and churl- ish streak that causes him to appear inadequate in dealing with the spirited American girl Florida Vervain, and distinctly ungracious in responding to his unfortunate rival, the priest Don Ippolito, who on his deathbed vainly reaches out to the coldhearted Ameri- can. Ferris's eventual triumph in marrying the rich and beautiful Flor- ida, is celebrated with sour notes: "People are never equal to the ro- mance of their youth in after life, ex- cept by fits, and Ferris especially could not keep himself at what he called the operatic pitch of their brief betrothal and the early days of their mar- riage. . . . It was fortunate for Ferris, since he could not work, that she had money; in exalted moments he had thought this a barrier to their mar- riage; yet he could not recall anyone who had refused the hand of a beauti- ful girl because of the accident of her wealth, and in the end, he silenced his scruples." In this novel, the heroine, too, with her erratic and imperious temper, is not entirely likable; How- ells' dampening psychological reduc- tions on behalf of realism were not confined to the male sex, but his fe- males tend at least to be dynamic, their sins ones of commission rather than omission, and the author asks the reader to excuse much that happens within, as he puts it here, "the whole mystery of a woman's nerves." "Indian Summer" also takes place in Italy, and its hero, Theodore Col- ville, like an older and plumper but not much wiser Ferris, also finds himself at the mercy of uncomprehended sex- ual maneuvers by the fair sex. Seven- teen years ago in Florence, he had vainly wooed an American girl; re- turning to this city as a tourist, he fails to realize that he is in love with her companion of old-now a widow